As we continue reading the Prologue, many more rabbinical characters are introduced: Rab Hamnuna the Venerable, R. Yudai, R. Hiya, R. Jose, R. Eleazar (son of R. Simeon), R. Abba, Rabbi Simeon the son of Lakunya, R. Phineas, and possibly more that I have missed.
Each of these Rabbis gives one or more expositions of biblical verses. These expositions are exceedingly fanciful, and they themselves tend to become stories, so that the whole Prologue is a kind of Canterbury Tales of biblical exegesis.
I wanted to skip some of these fanciful expositions to get sooner to the end of the Prologue, but they have their charm and their magic, and I had to read every one of them.
It is well that I did, because on page 57 of my Soncino edition (13b of the Mantua edition), I found something quite interesting: a reference to the "slender stroke underneath the Yod" in the Divine Name. This, of course, would only be present in a pointed Hebrew text. The masoretes did most of their work between about 600 and 800 CE, at which time pointed biblical texts came into prominence. This reference to pointing would have been anachronistic in the early centuries CE, supposedly the time when Simeon ben Yohai lived. We can be sure, therefore that this Prologue is of medieval origin.
The Prologue ends quite abruptly and without warning, as though the author had had a heart attack and died. My theory is that the Prologue was written after the rest of the Zohar, and that the author died before he could finish it. If the author was Mosés de León, we know that his wife outlived him.
Text and image Copyright © 2021 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
